02: We confronted destructive power dynamics inside our board of directors.There’s no such thing as a family foundation.

While Compton Foundation was originally funded by one family, its board of directors always included unrelated members. While these members were embraced for their subject-area expertise and grounding in real-world social movements, an unspoken difference in status persisted between “family” and “non-family” trustees.

Simply put, family voices were given more weight. Non-family trustees termed out after six years on the board, while family members could renew their terms indefinitely. Only family members could hold the top board offices. Complicating this dynamic even more, the foundation also had Family Advisory Board members who didn’t have legal governing duties but who were afforded a strong voice when major issues were discussed. (Fraught enough for you?)

In the years after the 2008 global financial crisis, this relational undercurrent became a riptide pulling the board into a discussion about whether to continue operating in perpetuity. Without making a conscious decision to do so, the foundation had been spending between seven and 11 percent of its assets each year — a rate that, if continued, would drastically reduce or exhaust the endowment over a short term. The board grappled with strategy: Should Compton Foundation spend everything deliberately, or should it cut back on staffing and decrease grantmaking to operate indefinitely?

Adding energy to this discussion, the civic climate seemed to be entering a new epoch. Freedoms and democratic norms were receding rapidly, accelerated by police violence, restrictive legislation and historic Supreme Court decisions.

The Family Advisory Board wanted to preserve the foundation forever — viewing it as a family inheritance that should be passed down to future generations. Doing so would mean eliminating some staff positions and reducing support for grant partners just when they faced unprecedented threats. Most members of the governing board disagreed. They were inclined to invest in a broader view of legacy by establishing a strategic organizational lifespan. They wanted to maintain staffing, sustain or increase grantmaking, and spend everything over a set period of time to support grant partners and social movements through these urgent, layered crises.

Intense conversations revealed the latent rifts between the “non-family” governing board members, who were called “expert” members but not quite embraced as full institutional decision-makers, and the founders’ heirs on both boards. The expert board members aligned with staff in valuing the organization’s impact over its longevity. The Family Advisory Board objected strongly. Ultimately, the governing board followed an unspoken rule about whose opinion carried the most weight — the expert members yielded to the family and voted with them in favor of perpetuity. (Spoiler alert: that decision was soon to be reversed.)

Compton Foundation was not unusual in the way descendants of the founding family felt they held ownership over the foundation’s resources. One rationale family members used to argue for perpetuity was that they “wanted their children to learn leadership skills in the boardroom,” as if this public resource were a private training ground for young people who held wealth and carried certain DNA.

Similar stories could be told across most family foundations. What happened next, though, was exceptional.

Director Jakada Imani, a Black man and one of two people of color on the board at the time, confronted this not-so-subtly coerced deference. When he surfaced the fact he had never agreed to his relevance and authority being diminished while other directors’ opinions were elevated with reference to a family tree, the immediate push-back revealed a fundamental belief among family members that the money was still “theirs” and by extension their points of view should count for more.

The board had expanded beyond White family members, but disregarded positional equity and practical inclusion. Even as Compton Foundation made surface shifts in response to new practices discussed widely in philanthropy — minimizing power dynamics between funders and grant seekers, lessening the burden of traditional grant application processes, centering Black, Brown and Indigenous leadership in grantmaking — it had failed to confront a fundamental asymmetry in how the foundation was governing itself.

These events also eroded a thin cover of progressive language, laying bare a deeply racialized resistance to the notion all board members should hold equal roles in practice. Other family members warned fourth-generation director and board chair Vanessa Compton Davenport that “these outsiders” might have “agendas” and, if she wasn’t careful, the foundation could be “taken over.”

Although the philanthropic industry promotes a distinction between private foundations funded through family wealth and those funded by other means, that difference is purely a social construct — and it’s one that family members in many foundations, including highly progressive ones, refuse to let go. “Non-family” board members are typically called “independent,” “community,” “fresh perspective,” or “external” trustees. Like at Compton Foundation, they are often subject to term and positional limits that don’t apply to family members or descendants on the board. These structures perpetuate the illusion that families retain ownership of this untaxed public money. In reality, the resource is actually not their own, but everyone’s, regardless of DNA.

Eventually, one branch of the family split off to form Scintilla Foundation. The two organizations shared many values but the new foundation chose a perpetual model. The board members who stayed with Compton Foundation aligned on a decision to spend the entire endowment. Sad to say, two of the family members who remained still persisted in advocating for grants based on what interested them most. Ultimately, Vanessa made the painful decision to break with her family in order to stay true to the foundation’s mission. She joined with Jakada and board members Alexandra Toma and Emilie Cortes to remove her relatives from the board and proceed on equal footing. No special titles, no skewed term or positional limits, just four peers serving the public interest on a private foundation governing board.